


No White Light

by websandwhiskers



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Disfigurement, F/M, Identity Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 08:21:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/746369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/websandwhiskers/pseuds/websandwhiskers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jess survives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No White Light

People talk about shock; about pain becoming abstracted, about a rush of endorphins, about seeing your life flash before your eyes. A sense of peace. White light.

People are full of shit. Burning feels like _burning._ But then, maybe it's different if you're actually dying – which Jess isn't.

Sam's hands grab, pull, wrench her away from the ceiling. It takes force, and it's slow, clumsy, like pulling dead weight up through water – like gravity inverted, with interest, which seems fitting in a hysterical sort of way. He batters her raw flesh with his own reddened hands, rolling her in the sheets – such innocent things, cotton sheets, to be turned into instruments of torture, sticky fibers adhering where there isn't skin any more. The flames go out with relative ease, and in the absence of their roaring there is only the steady litany of Sam's swearing, what she thinks is Latin interspersed with obscenities and the occasional hollar of, _“DEAN!”_

Jess wonders where Dean is, how far away – down the hall? Just outside the door? How long has it been since Sam got home? She's lost all sense of time, her entire existence divided neatly into three segments – before Brady knocked on the door (her fingers greasy with cookie dough and she's in her nightgown and she knows Brady sort of has a thing for her so maybe she shouldn't answer the door? But he's a friend. She's lonely, up at night, baking cookies, convincing herself Sam will be home in time to eat them. The company would be nice. She can just unlock the door and then go throw a robe on.)

After she opened the door.

That part lasts a long, long time, considerably longer than the part that came before, with childhood and family and friends and Sam and everything she ever thought she knew about herself. The part with Brady is just so much larger than all of that. Then the fire. That's all sort of the same thing, really.

And now. This is a new part, after.

She hears the door kicked open, a rough, panicked voice calling, “Sam?!”

“In here!” Sam calls, and he seems to have realized that the sheets are sticking to her, because suddenly he's not touching her anymore, just hovering there, panting and sweating and muttering, “OhGodohGodohGod,” over and over and over again. Feet come pounding into the bedroom.

Jess doesn't want Sam's brother to see her like this; what bits of nightgown she has left are more _in_ her than _on_ her, fused into her skin. She can't seem to speak to tell Sam so, though. Her pain exists in layers; peel one back and there's another waiting beneath it. Sam's hands beating out the flames are replaced by the hitching, shuddering agony that is just breathing with her scorched lungs.

“It's here, it was just like Mom, it's _here,_ it's -” Sam's voice breaks. “Fuck, _Jess -_ ”

She hears Dean pick up the phone, demanding an ambulance with a terse, military precision she's heard from Sam just once or twice, when things were bad – when that kid passed out and fell down the stairs at that party sophmore year. That time he heard something behind the bar, made her wait while he went and checked it out and she called the cops on her cell phone, shivering in her heels and feeling like she'd wandered into some parallel universe, someplace colder and darker than the world of classes and parties and weekends home that she lived in.

Dean's voice barks out a question – the address. Sam answers in the same voice; it cracks, but it's there, it's together, it's not wavering.

Jess knows, on some level, past the pain, past the horror of what's been done to her body in a matter of seconds, that she's tumbled head-first down the rabbit hole; that _after_ is going to be all about that place that's colder, darker, full of the sounds of scuffling and swearing and words muttered in dead languages, around the corner where she couldn't quite see. Fine hairs on her arms standing on end. The music from the bar a million, billion miles away. Jess was always sort of mad at herself that she'd done what she was told that night – that she'd stood there in the cold and waited, huddled in the weak light coming out the door.

Jess isn't mad at herself for that anymore.

***

He tells her in broken lurches of story, brought to her bedside in lieu of flowers. A week ago she would have said he was insane, that he needed help – not because she wouldn't have believed him, really, but because that was just how the world worked. You didn't talk about things like that.

Now her world is made up of burn treatments that will lead to skin grafts, lung capacity and blood oxygen levels, like she's been swallowed up yet again into yet another alien world. A universe spins around her, people coming and going at irregular intervals, feeding her, washing her, scrubbing away the dead bits of her. It is very possible to believe in Hell and demons.

“I'm sorry,” Sam says, almost every day, sometimes every hour. “I'm so sorry. I should have told you.”

“It's okay,” Jess says, and knows from the way he looks at her that what he hears is, _I forgive you,_ when really that's not what she's saying at all. It's a lot closer to _thanks anyway for trying,_ really.

There's a devil's trap drawn under her bed, courtesy of Sam's brother and a gruff, bearded older man who's related to them somehow, she's not entirely clear on how. The day he came is mostly full of morphine haze. He brought her a sad little bouquet of grocery store carnations, squeezed Sam's shoulder, said something Jess couldn't hear. It had made Sam sit a little straighter, though, so Jess decides, on a wave of opiate goodwill, that she loves this man and when she's better, she's going to bake him cookies.

Sam fills the little styrofoam cups they bring her, the ones with the pathetic little bendy straws, with holy water. He finds a way to knock into the nurses and orderlies who tend to her, making the little cups splash. So far, no one's skin has burned when the water hit them.

The holy water feels no different from any other water going down her throat. Everything burns.

Jess was an agnostic. Liberal with some libertarian leanings. She was a member of two honor societies, the campus gay/straight alliance, and volunteered twice a year with Habitat for Humanity. She was vehemently anti-censorship, pro-choice in an on-the-fence sort of way, and liked rare steak too much to ever go vegetarian. She made a mean chocolate chip cookie.

Now, Jess is a body trying to re-grow skin. An infant all over again, with limbs that don't work the way she wants them to and no understanding of the ways of this world. She has no illusions that anything Sam could have told her could have prepared her in any way for what's happened to her. If she thought that he'd brought this on her, she suspects she'd be homicidally furious with him. He didn't, though – she understands, without anyone having to explain it to her, that the idea of two words, separate and inviolable, is a pleasant semantic distinction only. It has no bearing on reality.

Jess remembers that night at the bar, remembers Sam's voice ringing out, and the muffled shriek of something not quite human. Remembers the way his hands shook when he trudged back out into view, the urgency of his steps, the way his grip was just a little too tight on her arm as he told her they had to go and no, they shouldn't wait for the cops. Remembers how he smelled, like ozone and sulfur and ash.

Remembers how she went along with it, and dropped the cell phone she'd used to call the cops into the gutter without being prompted, and never, ever asked him what happened. Just the taste, the smell of it had lingered on him for days, and something in the base of her skull hadn't needed to ask. She told herself that she didn't want to know. Plausible deniability.

Jess was, and is, a piss-poor liar, even when she's lying to herself.

_It's okay,_ Jess tries to tell him, but can't, not quite. _I knew._

_***_

“I need to know that you're safe,” Sam tells her, oh so earnestly, when she's well enough to walk and talk and refuse to go back to school. He's been coming and going for months now. He found his father. His father died.

Jess's father has a hard time looking at her; he tries, she can tell that he tries, so hard, since she's come home (where else would she go, if she's not going back to school?) They sit and watch football and talk politics and it should be normal, and maybe that's the problem. Jess can see the way Dad's face changes no matter how he fights it, the sheer rage that's there just under the surface all the time now, every time he sees her. He can't look at her without seeing what was done to her, and that's not metaphor, that's nothing so easy or tidy as post-traumatic stress. She's scarred over eighty percent of her body. Strangers on the street can't look at her without knowing what was done to her, though most of them, she thinks, probably assume it was some sort of accident.

Brady was found in an alley three days after the fire, dead without a mark on him. There's no one for her dad to go after – no one human, anyway, and that's as far as her dad understands what happened.

Jess knows better.

Jess can't see her own face, when Dad's face goes all strange, can't see the look she gives him in return – when she looks in the mirror there's just this alien creature looking back. It's not that the scars are ugly, though they're certainly not pretty – it's that they're so _different._ The change feels like it went deeper than it did, physically, like she's not a damaged human but a whole . . something else. She's not sure what.

Mom is a little better, possibly because she and Jess never really got along, and if she's carefully solicitous, she's also hawk-like watchful, eye sharp for any hint that Jess is giving in. Mom expects her to _get through this,_ like she's been given some sort of demented opportunity to be a better person. A _strong woman,_ which means something to her mother in some Lifetime movie way that, growing up, had always made Jess roll her eyes. She'd somehow made Jess's good-ole-boys-club career ambitions and the way she'd holler at the TV during the game (just like one of the guys) into something embarrassing, as if she was doing it to prove a point. Now she's apparently supposed to prove something by _not being a victim._

Jess blinks into the mirror at night when they're in bed and thinks that yes, she can see that she's still beautiful in a way. Like a Dali painting.

Mom is easier to deal with than Dad because Jess can get angry at her; she doesn't feel like apologizing to Mom.

Sam is impossible.

Jess doesn't know if they would be having sex again if she weren't in her parents' house, but it's something of a relief not to have the possibility there. She misses it, she misses him, but she's afraid that he'd be _careful_ with her now, and if he were, she thinks she might have to hit him. She thinks she might have to _hurt_ him.

Jess thinks that this not-so-human thing she's turned into ought to have sharp teeth.

No elongated canines grin back at her in the mirror, but Brady taught her oh so well that things you can't see can be very, very real. Her smile pulls taut in ways a human face shouldn't. Her hair is just starting to grow back, over most of her head, anyway; it's streaked white in places, ashy dark blonde everywhere else because she can't bleach it anymore, her scalp is too delicate. That makes the white stand out more.

“I'm not safe,” Jess tells Sam, the words flat and without inflection, an invitation for him to take that any way he chooses. “If you don't take me with you, I'll find somebody else to teach me to shoot and I'll go out on my own. I'm doing this, Sam.”

He stares at her long and hard, and Jess know that face; knows there's something he doesn't want to say, but he's going to say it anyway. Sam's earnest like that; she used to love that about him because it meant, in some abstracted way, that he had integrity – that she'd picked a good one, an honorable man.

Now she loves him for it because she knows that whatever he's going to say, it's going to hurt, and he's going to let it. It weaves through her head that maybe he _wouldn't_ be careful with her, and it makes a hot curl of _want_ unfurl for the first time since the fire.

“We have to blend in,” Sam says, words dragged out of him.

“You? Have to blend in?” Jess answers, brow quirked as much as it will quirk anymore. She's tall enough that she's always stood out, and she still has to look up at him. “You. In your brother's muscle car. Try again, Sam,” she says.

For a moment he just look utterly gobsmacked.

The thing that looks back at her in the mirror likes that, in some primitive, animal way.

Then he looks so relieved she could cry. “Fine,” Sam says, shaking his head. “Fine, you're right, I'm an idiot, you're safer fighting than hiding. I don't suppose you could convince your parents to take an extended vacation to somewhere off the map?”

“Probably not,” Jess says, sobering. She pauses, considers, decides she has to say it just so it will have been said. “We could tell them.”

Sam's jaw clenches. Works. More words like knives, fighting their way to his throat; Sam, Jess thinks, spends far too much time trying not to be what he is.

Because whatever it is she's turned into, she can see now that he's the same sort of creature, and he has been all along. He's just got better camouflage. The female of this species, Jess thinks, has the showier plumage.

It's an utterly insane thing to think, she realizes that, but damn it, this isn't a Lifetime movie. Fuck that. She likes it.

“They won't believe it until they see it,” Jess says for him.

“Yeah,” Sam agrees, shoulders slumping. “It's – God, I'm sorry, Jess.” As if it's already happened, as if she should be making funeral arrangements now.

“Don't be,” she says, maybe a little too sharply. “This was always the world. You didn't make it this way.”

“Still,” he insists.

Jess doesn't know quite how to tell him that a growing piece of herself is happy, in a twisted sort of way, or at least expects to be happy, once they get going. A part of her looks back on the peaceful life where he would have practiced law and she would have run for city council somewhere in Heartland, US, where they would have made stilted conversation with her mother over too much food every Sunday and Sam would have sat with her father trying to pretend to care about football, and it makes her new skin crawl. But that's not going to happen now, she reminds herself; she has clawed something worthwhile out of the charred wreck of herself, and no one, _no one_ is taking it from her.

But – she lets her breath shudder out of her, makes herself calm down – Sam isn't looking like he wants to take anything from her. Take her, maybe, but not take from her. Sam doesn't look at her like he still sees her unscarred – he looks at her like he wants her, now, like this, and he's not sure if that makes him noble or sick.

That, Jess thinks, will work just fine.

***

 


End file.
